go back to january harwood at the white house, president obama talking about the fiscal cliff. john? >> i wanted to play a soundbite from the bloomberg interview that i mentioned to sue a few minutes ago. one yes offered a carrot to say if you do that in the short term, put revenue on the table concretely in that way, we will have a long process of tax entitlement reform that could end up reducing the rate in 2013. here is the president. >> not able to come up with a comprehensive tax reform package that gets it all done just in the next two weeks. we are not going to be able to come one necessarily comprehensive entitlement reform package that gets it all done in the next two weeks. when you luke at what ronald reagan did back in 1986, working with bill bradley and others, that was a year and a half process. what i have suggested is let's essentially put a down payment on taxes, let's let tax rates on the upper income folks go up. >> now, the difficulty of tax reform has been a concern of the white house throughout this discussion, all the way back to 2011. it's why they insis